“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France
“You just can’t be racist the way you used to,” begins Charles M. Blow .
No. Not most places. Using the N-word with abandon meant freedom to some people. During EMT training in the emergency room decades ago, one of my patients wore a black tee shirt with white block letters reading “I HATE (N-words).” There was a large-caliber, blue-black hole in his foot where he’d shot himself with a percussion-cap revolver as antique as the racial attitudes broadcast across his chest.
That was then. Nowadays they wear their tee shirts under oxford shirts and ties while writing legislation to suppress the votes of poor people. “Poor” now being a proxy for Black.
“There are two ways to win an election: convince enough voters that you are best suited for the job, or rid the electorate of as many people who would vote against you as possible,” Blow writes. Republicans have chosen the latter:
It can sound reasonable enough to demand that people have a state-issued ID to vote. After all, proponents ask, don’t you need an ID to drive, fly or open a bank account? But that argument ignores the fact that there are millions of Americans who don’t drive, have never flown and have no bank or credit union account.
So long as the burden is everyone’s, Republicans can hide behind their lawmaking’s majestic equality.
But the burden of voter ID laws falls heaviest on poorer voters who tend to be Black and tend to vote for Democrats. Racial discrimination under the cover of “election integrity” or “ballot security” is by design.
When state legislatures make it less convenient to register or to vote, it also greatly affects the poor. Poverty is the ultimate inconvenience. It is incredibly time consuming to be poor. The things that people with money take for granted — like shopping for groceries or making a doctor’s appointment — require considerably more time and energy when you lack money. If you make tasks like voting harder, it means that poor people will do them less often.
Prohibiting Sunday voting, “souls to the polls” communal voting favored in Black communities is another legislated inconvenience with a target demographic. Plus limiting poll hours and early voting sites as well as siting early voting sites more remote to minority communities than white ones.
Blow adds:
What we are seeing across the country are effectively Republican attempts to resurrect a poll tax — to use poverty and income inequality (which white supremacy helps to create) to further racial oppression.
We are witnessing attempts to use poverty and disadvantage as tools to silence voices. It is a further dehumanizing and delegitimizing of the poor.
In the early days of the Republic, only rich landowning white men were routinely allowed to vote. The ability to participate in how the country was governed was inherited or acquired in life — and many were excluded.
I have always believed that conservatives in this country have bemoaned the expansion of the franchise and have continuously fought to make it more narrow again.
Across the country conservative legislators have set about making barriers to voting even higher for Black voters by targeting the poor. Even now, for all the heat Georgia Republican legislators feel for their efforts to head off losses in 2022, they are preparing yet another assault (CNN):
Word of a new 93-page bill came about an hour before a scheduled hearing of a special election integrity committee in the Georgia House, and it set off outrage from voting rights activists who called it a “disgraceful” bait-and-switch tactic.
“They are attacking voting rights from every single angle,” Hillary Holley of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, said in a hastily arranged news conference.
Earlier in the day, the committee’s public agenda had described the hearing as centered on a two-page bill, dealing narrowly with absentee voting provisions — only to substitute it with the sweeping bill.
In his first Senate floor speech, Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock addressed the widespread effort by Republicans to choose their voters rather than allow an open democratic process to choose them.
The full speech is below.